From the International Medical Informatics Association

IMIA Human Factors WG Symposium – photos and presentations

The IMIA Working Group on Human Factors Engineering in Health Informatics held a successful symposium at the Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa in the Sonoma Valley, California on November 12-13, 2009.

The presentations from the Symposium are available here to download; our thanks to Daniel Mohrer, from the Center for Biomedical Informatics, Mount Sinai Medical Center, for help in making them available.

Daniel reports on the event that:
At this year’s IMIA Working Group on Human Factors Engineering Symposium, held in Sonoma, California on November 12-13, 2009 and hosted by Dr. Peter Elkin and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, twenty-six IMIA members from Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia, and across the United States assembled to present and discuss novel methods regarding the engineering, implementation and analysis of usable and efficient electronic health systems. This intimate gathering gave participants the opportunity to share ideas and compare the strategies that we employ across the globe.

The first keynote speaker, Dr. Vimla L. Patel, PhD, DSc, FRSC , from the Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, discussed the impact of observation studies on efficient information technology integration and simplification of both human-computer interactions and clinical workflows. On day two, Dr. Dag Svanæs, PhD, from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, presented on usability standards and their relevance to Health Informatics, discussing the hardship of quantifying usability and highlighting the positive effects that user-centered design processes may have not only on patient care quality and efficiency, but also on increased safety and security and decreased time and cost of care. Discussions throughout the symposium delved further into these topics and highlighted the necessity of usability standards implementation for health care systems throughout the world.

The student paper / presentation competition was won by Anita Das, a PhD candidate from Trondheim, Norway for her paper entitled “E‐health design for self‐care management after weight loss treatment.” The delightful setting of Sonoma, the southwestern county of California’s wine country, added to the success of this two day symposium. In addition to the sixteen presentations on human factors engineering, the attendees enjoyed an evening of fine dining and wine tasting at the beautiful Artesa winery. The IMIA Human Factors Engineering Working Group will be hosting its next meeting in 2011 in Trondheim, Norway in association with Medical Informatics Europe (MIE 2011).

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